


I have this breath and I hold it tight

by 100indecisions



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, He also needs a hug, Maximoff Fic Exchange, Missing Scene, Pre-Wanda Maximoff/Vision, Steve Is a Good Bro, The Raft Prison (Marvel), Wanda Maximoff Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-31
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-05 08:42:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15860166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/100indecisions/pseuds/100indecisions
Summary: Steve finally goes to Wanda’s tiny room and taps on the doorframe, although it’s hardly necessary, with the slightly warped floorboards creaking under his feet. “Hey,” he says. “Got a minute?”Wanda's been a little withdrawn since Steve broke everyone out of the Raft. She's had a lot to think about.





	I have this breath and I hold it tight

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [MaximoffFicExchange2018](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/MaximoffFicExchange2018) collection. 



> The original prompt was for Wanda and Steve getting a moment to talk, and I figured immediately post-CW would be a good time for that; Wanda went through _a lot_ in Civil War, after all, and Steve being Steve, I'm sure he'd feel guilty about it (entirely regardless of whose fault the whole mess might have been). So I wanted to explore that a little, and then it kind of turned into an attempt to bridge the time between Civil War and Infinity War, and how Wanda might go from her "I can't control their fear, only my own" arc, to being locked up in the Raft _in a straitjacket and shock collar_ , to Infinity War where she's in a comfortable relationship with Vision and she's become even more of a magically powerful badass. 
> 
> This fic can be read as a companion piece to my other Wanda fic, [get used to the dust in your lungs](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10776093); there's nothing in this one that won't make sense without reading the other, but all the headcanons/interpretations I established in that fic are definitely still in play here whether I specifically mentioned them again or not. The title of this one is from "Between Two Lungs" by Florence + the Machine (the rest of the song really doesn't fit, but I liked this line for the fic).

Steve knows it really doesn’t matter, but he can’t help feeling a certain petty satisfaction at the fact that the Raft is _far_ from the toughest place he’s had to infiltrate. Oh, it’s not easy by any means, especially without a team to back him up, but even with 80 years of technological developments, Ross has nothing on HYDRA. The smugness, such as it is, lasts as long as it takes to reach the others and make sure they’re all right. He gets to Wanda last, and then everything else is drowned out by a mix of rage and suffocating guilt, because she’s huddled on the floor of her cell, bound in a straitjacket and a shock collar like a dangerous animal.

She’s never looked _less_ dangerous than she does right now; she looks small and exhausted, washed out in the harsh light, with bruise-like smudges under eyes that aren’t focusing on anything, and Steve wonders how many bruises the straitjacket hides. They might have all surrendered in the end, when they were fighting their friends, but when Ross’s people locked her up like this—she must have fought them, at least a little. She never talked about it much but Steve’s always been observant, and he knows she has a deep-seated horror of being _trapped_ , after the way her parents died and then the way HYDRA treated her and Pietro. The Raft’s little cells are bad enough, but when they hauled out the straitjacket and the damned _shock collar_ —

Maybe Ross’s goons didn’t fight her physically. Maybe they threatened Clint or Sam. Steve isn’t sure which idea is worse.

 _Goddamnit, Tony, I told you this would happen, I_ told _you the Accords were always headed here_ , he thinks furiously. _If you’d just_ listened _to me—_

And if Steve had tried harder to explain, had gotten onboard while demanding safeguards to make sure they could present a united front to Ross, had told Tony the moment he so much as suspected the Winter Soldier was responsible for Howard and Maria’s deaths, had planned for the rest of the Avengers to show up at the airport, had worked harder to figure out Zemo’s plan, had done anything but what he did, which was allow the Avengers to fracture and then lead the remainder of his team into a fight they couldn’t all win—

At least where Wanda is concerned, Steve is as much to blame as Tony is. He’s gotten used to carrying the weight of decisions like this, living with it and moving forward anyway to keep saving as many lives as he can, but the results have never looked quite like this before.

 _Deal with it later. Keep moving_. Steve keys in the door’s code and then wrenches it open for good measure. Wanda twitches at the noise but otherwise doesn’t react. He crouches in front of her, moving slowly, with his hands in plain view. “Hey,” he says gently. “You with me?”

Wanda blinks once, still without seeming to see him. She says something in Sokovian, her voice rusty with disuse; the only word Steve catches is _Pietro_ , and his heart twists. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s just me. Steve.”

It takes a few seconds, but her expression gradually sharpens, as if her mind is coming back from a very long way away. “Steve.”

“Yeah,” he says, and finds a smile. “Feel like getting out of here?”

* * *

The team, such as it is, dwindles quickly after leaving the Raft. Bucky chooses to go back into cryo until Princess Shuri can find a way to fix him; Clint and Lang accept deals with the government so they can return to their families, although Clint decides to stick around for a few days, with the flimsy excuse that it’s his (virtually unused) Amsterdam safehouse they’re holed up in and he needs to make sure they don’t wreck the property value. He doesn’t look toward Wanda’s room when he says it, but his concern for her is clear enough, and it’s a concern Steve shares. Wanda was the only one who got a straitjacket and a fucking _shock collar_ , after all, and although she’s fine physically, she also seems…distant, almost withdrawn, spending most of her time in the room she was given.

The day Clint leaves for the US, Steve overhears him talking to her, apparently trying to convince her to go back with him. “Honestly, fuck my government deal, I’ve done the fugitive thing before. And you know Laura and the kids love you.”

Wanda’s smile looks genuine; it also looks like it hurts a little. “I love them too, and that’s why I can’t. Nobody’s ready to forgive me. Staying with your family would just mean you’d all have to hide too. Your kids deserve better than that.”

“ _You_ deserve better,” Clint says, angry and defeated.

She hugs him, but she doesn’t go with him when he leaves.

Sam stays. “Where else would I want to go?” he says, when Steve asks if he’s sure.

“Literally anywhere you’re not a fugitive?” Steve suggests dryly.

Sam just shrugs. “Depressing as it is, I wasn’t leaving much behind when I joined you in the first place, and that hasn’t changed. ‘Sides, I figure some world-ending threat bad enough to need everybody is gonna come along sooner or later, and I’d rather be with you when it does so I can make sure I get to see Ross eat his words.”

“Fair enough,” Steve says, and that just leaves Wanda. As far as he knows, she doesn’t have anywhere else to go either, but after the way Ross treated her…he can’t ask her to risk that again. He just doesn’t know what else he can offer.

A couple days after Clint’s departure, Steve finally goes to Wanda’s tiny room and taps on the doorframe, although it’s hardly necessary, with the slightly warped floorboards creaking under his feet. “Hey,” he says. “Got a minute?”

She’s sitting on the narrow bed, watching the bicycle traffic on the street below, and she turns to smile at him. It’s a small smile, but at least it looks like a real one. “Of course. I’m sorry I’ve been a little distant. I’ve just—had a lot to think about.”

“You have nothing to apologize for,” Steve says firmly, trying to keep the painful twist of guilt from his expression. The last thing he wants is to do anything that will make her focus on his feelings instead of her own. He hesitates, then says carefully, “Especially not to me. You followed me into a fight that turned into nothing we expected, and because you wanted to do the right thing, you got locked up. That’s on me.”

“ _You_ didn’t put me in a shock collar,” Wanda says. “And you got us all out.”

“I made some mistakes,” Steve says, “and a lot of people paid for them, including you. I know it doesn’t change anything now, but—I wanted to say I’m sorry. And none of this was your fault.”

Wanda pulls her legs up to sit cross-legged, almost a mirror image of that last conversation in the upstate Avengers facility. “I made my own choices, Steve. We all did.”

“I know,” he says, and remembers _You must allow Barnes the dignity of his choice_. It hurts all over again, if not in quite the same way or for exactly the same reasons. “You’re right, and I don’t mean to downplay that. But for the ways my choices led to other people getting hurt—I’m sorry for that, and I’m especially sorry for putting you in a situation where you got locked up again. I can’t undo it, but if you wanted to talk to somebody about it…I’m happy to listen.” Inwardly, he winces at just how inadequate the offer is.

“Thanks,” she says with another wan smile. “I’ve been…trying to figure things out. But I’m not really sure what to say.”

“Do you want to tell me what you’ve been thinking?”

She’s silent for a long moment. Finally she says, “I know I need to decide what I want to do next. But—it’s a little hard to put into words.”

“Well,” Steve says with a smile he hopes is reassuring, “I’ve got nothing on my schedule for…oh right, I don’t have a schedule anymore.”

“You and Sam,” she says. “You’re going to keep helping people. Right?”

“We’re gonna be vigilante superheroes, yeah, which is a sentence I never thought I’d say. Natasha will be joining us too, I think. It’s…not a great situation, but…” He sighs. “I figure I can do a lot more to help people if I’m not in jail, and if I’m gonna be a fugitive anyway, might as well go all the way on the helping-people front.”

Wanda nods, looking down at her hands. Red wisps of magic curl around her fingers, and the motion of it abruptly reminds Steve of a cat pushing its head into someone’s hand to offer comfort. “I still want to help people,” she says. “So I’m available if you really need me, as long as nobody can track you that way. But I can’t—” She stops again, clearly struggling for words.

Steve tries not to wince. “You don’t owe me an explanation, Wanda. You don’t owe anything to anybody, honestly.”

“No?” she says. “What about you? You are a supersoldier, and you feel responsibility to use that for good, don’t you?”

 _That’s different_ , Steve wants to say, only he can’t think of a reason that would back it up.

“I think I owe the world that too,” Wanda says quietly. “At least—I have these powers. I asked for them, I suppose, but…I didn’t know what I was asking for. But I have them now, and I couldn’t give them back even if I wanted to, and—I have to be responsible, if I can’t do anything else. No more accidents.”

“Lagos was _not_ your fault,” Steve says, pained. “None of us thought to practice explosion containment on that scale. The fact that you reacted at all, in a split second, when I just froze—you did save lives. Casualties would’ve been way worse if you’d done nothing.”

“I know. At least—I think I know. Nobody can say for sure, I suppose.” She sighs. “I know who I am, I think. And I know what people like Ross see, and what he got Tony to see, and what Strucker saw, but…”

“They were wrong,” Steve says. “I don’t care what they thought they saw. They were all wrong.”

Her expression turns pensive. “I am…not so sure. I don’t know if Strucker had a reason to think Pietro and I would develop powers instead of dying like the others did, but he saw—my country is full of anger and pain, and he was right to see it in me. I was—so angry, for so long. Every time I remembered my parents and how they died, I remembered staring at that Stark Industries missile, trapped in the rubble with it and waiting to die too, and when I didn’t—the anger was the only thing that made sense. When Strucker found me, I’d been angry for half my life. And he was right, to think he could use it to turn me into a weapon. He tricked us, but—he was right, too. And Ultron, I think he was born angry, so he saw it as well, and he picked up the weapon Strucker made and almost destroyed the world with it.”

“You’re not a _weapon_ ,” Steve says sharply. “You’re a _person_.”

Wanda gives him that painful smile again. “I think maybe I’m both. I’m—different now, powerful and dangerous, and I can’t hand over the thing that makes me dangerous because it’s just _me_. I was already thinking about that, with the Accords, and then after you told us about Zemo and why he did it, all I could think was—he is like me. He lost everyone he loved and blamed the wrong people, and his anger and pain blinded him to everything else. The only difference is he succeeded. He killed people and tore apart the Avengers for vengeance that didn’t bring his family back, and with my powers…I could do so much worse, if I was angry or afraid enough. Even before, because I was so angry, I was tricked into working for _actual Nazis_ , and then a robot who wanted to end the world, and still I could do so much worse.”

“You already could have, though,” Steve says. “You had the chance with Ultron and you gave up your chance at revenge so you could stop him. You’ve got a good heart, and you’ve shown that over and over again.”

She smiles faintly. “I hope so. But being who I am, now, means I have to consider it. I can’t pretend everything’s the same.”

“Would you give it up, if you could?” Steve asks, not sure if he wants to know the answer.

“Would you?” she says, and Steve doesn’t know how to answer that either. “I don’t know. But it doesn’t seem possible, so for a little while I thought—maybe I should just…stop. It would be hard, now, but I could do it, I think. Except I realized, if I tried to shut off that part of myself, then someday…I would explode. I wouldn’t be able to control it, then. I may not know everything about my power, but I know it well enough to be sure of that. So. Ignoring who and what I am now, and what I can do—that isn’t the answer.”

Steve nods, more than a little relieved. What Wanda chooses to do with her power isn’t really his business, but there’s something awful about the idea of her repressing something so important and making herself _small_ because she feels like she should. “Might be one of those things that doesn’t have a perfect answer.”

“I think,” Wanda says slowly, “actually, this one does. I am powerful and that means I’m dangerous; those are facts. I can’t change that, and I can’t change anything that’s already happened. All I can do is—carry it, and learn to live with it. Learn how to be a weapon _and_ a person. Other people made me a weapon, and you all showed me how to take that back and be a weapon for myself, but I think…I’ve been afraid of myself and my anger and I can’t be, anymore, if I want to be responsible with my power. I can’t hold back. If I want to protect people and do the most I can with what I am—I need control, but it can’t come from holding back out of fear. There will only be more accidents, if I hold back because I’m afraid.”

Steve turns that over in his head a couple times. She’s never brought it up before, but then they never really had a chance for a debrief after everything, and like she said, she’s had a lot to think about. “That’s what happened in Lagos? You were holding back?”

“Not deliberately,” Wanda says. “And I didn’t realize until later. But—I think so. If I wasn’t afraid of myself on some level, maybe I could’ve contained the explosion after all. Maybe it would have even been easy.”

That…makes a certain amount of sense, actually. It didn’t occur to Steve as a possibility and he suspects it wouldn’t have without Wanda saying it, but she knows herself best—and thinking about his own adjustment period after the serum, he wonders why he didn’t see it before. “I get it, I think,” he says. “After Project Rebirth, I didn’t know my own body for a while, and I kept breaking things because I would forget, or just…not realize what I could do now. Trying to be careful wasn’t what fixed the problem. I had to relearn my own limits and figure out what I could do when I pushed myself, and then the accidents finally stopped because I knew myself again.” He sighs. “I should have realized that might apply to you too. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

Wanda shrugs. “Like I said—I didn’t realize either, for a long time, and you couldn’t know what to do with magic. But now I know, and that means I need to act on what I know and find out what I’m capable of, one way or another.”

“What are you going to do?” Steve asks.

She hesitates. “Vision contacted me yesterday. He doesn’t know where we are,” she adds quickly. “But he wants to meet. And I want to…try. I think…it’ll help, being with him. He knows how it feels too, trying to be a weapon and a person at the same time, with powers that nobody else can really understand, and he’s never been afraid of me for it.”

“Even after you buried him several stories underground?” Steve says, smiling to make sure she knows he’s teasing. It feels like a weight lifting away, just knowing that Wanda has a plan of her own. “Damn, he really must like you.”

Her smile turns a little impish. “Well, it _was_ pretty impressive.”

“Honestly,” Steve says, “I know I’m not the leader of the Avengers anymore by any definition, but for what it’s worth, I’ve always been proud of you, and I have every faith that you’ll figure out whatever you need to.”

She leans back on her hands and smiles at him, looking more at peace than she has in days. “You know, after Ultron, I lost everything all over again, but then you gave me a new family. No matter what happens in the future, that isn’t going to change, and I won’t forget it.”

“And I couldn’t ask for a better family,” Steve says. The guilt hasn’t disappeared just because she doesn’t blame him, and the losses never really stop hurting, and he has no idea what the future might bring. But the idea of Wanda growing her power and coming even more into her own—well, that gives him a little more hope for all of it. “I don’t know how any of this will work out—you and Vision, me with the vigilante thing—but I want you to know: if you need me, I’ll be there.”

“You’re a good friend, Steve,” she says, and gets up to hug him. Stepping back so she can meet his eyes, she says seriously, “I want you to know the same thing. If you need me, I’ll be there.”

“Any time you feel up to it,” Steve says, “I am always happy to have you on the team. You’re a damn force of nature, Wanda Maximoff.”

She gives his hand a gentle squeeze, but he can almost feel the power behind it, the magic humming under her skin. “We both are. We’re Avengers, after all.”

**Author's Note:**

> Squeaking in juuuuuuust under the wire as usual while it's still August 31--well, technically it's not but I haven't gone to bed yet so I say it counts. And yes, I'm aware the deadline was extended for the fic exchange; I'm up late because I decided to keep my own deadline. I am not a clever man. (And yes, I realized shortly after posting this that because of the nature of the exchange, it wouldn't actually be visible to anyone but me until...quite a while after August 31. I AM NOT A CLEVER MAN.)
> 
> Also, because it probably isn't clear unless you follow me on [Tumblr](http://thelightofthingshopedfor.tumblr.com), "At least where Wanda is concerned, Steve is as much to blame as Tony is" does not actually reflect my opinion, but I think it makes sense for _Steve_ to think that, because...taking on the weight of everything is kind of what Steve does. By contrast, some of Tony's dialogue ("they don't give visas to weapons of mass destruction" okay _yikes_ ) shows that he does see some merit in Ross's line of thinking, even if he never wanted or expected anybody to end up on the Raft. Given that he seems to have been more removed from day-to-day Avengers business before Civil War, he probably never got to know Wanda as a person in quite the same way Steve did, so maybe it was easier for him to be a little more detached there, I don't know. 
> 
> Of course, ultimately, Civil War was a huge mess for which no one was completely to blame and basically everyone was right about some things and wrong about others. I mean, except Ross, I'm happy to dump like 90% of the blame on him because he had to have been waiting to exploit an opportunity like this and there is zero chance his motives are pure, especially when I can't imagine how he clawed his way back into power and respectability in the first place. Like c'mon Marvel, you can't treat the Hulk movie as dubiously canonical and forget Betty exists but then confirm it as canon by using the same actor for Ross _but also_ continuing to forget Betty exists AND ignoring that Ross's previous MCU appearance ended in total, career-ruining disgrace without offering at least a little explanation for how he came back from that. ...wait, I forgot, Ross is an old white guy with connections, there's no such thing as "total, career-ruining disgrace" for somebody like him and actually that's probably the most realistic part of the movie. Silly me.


End file.
